Interesting that the first statistic chosen is "global paper consumption" and yet the graphic shows "number of trees consumed per capita". The first implies an aggregated number, the second an average. Shouldn't The Economist be making the apples-apples comparisons, i.e. total consumption 1980 vs total consumption 2012 and per capita 1980 vs per capita 2012?

Also, what effect does recycling have? Using paper is not necessarily the same as cutting trees.

if it talks about purely consumption of paper, yes these numbers show the story. But we care about the impacts of the consumption and not the consumption itself. By this I mean, what's the environmental impacts of this trend, Does this trend imply we lose more forest? What's the impact on the climate change. If the consumption does not destroy the quality of forest, does not impose extra burden on the forest system, what's the point to show these numbers. The Economist can not just show these numbers, you can do more.

There is probably so much double counting on this chart it isn't funny. The US (as many others on this list) produces and processes millions of tons of paper products each year, yet according to this chart's methodology each step counts for additional tonnage. This is the lazy man's measurement, the one you get when you don't bother tracing the value chain.

Is this just for the paper milling of the business and office world or else it includes other applications such as sanitation, personal hygiene and food industry?

It appears from the figure shown that richer economies wrap themselves with more paper. But conclusions can be inferred quite differently for different categories of paper product consumption.

China may be a bantamweight or lightweight in lumberjacking, but it is heavyweight in planting trees. China has planted a total of 61.4 billion trees (by 1.33 billion person-sorties) since 1980, and it has a forest area of over 2 million sq km in 2010, the world’s fifth largest after Russia, Brazil, Canada and USA.

Although the countries are roughly equivalent in total area, Canada has only 35 million inhabitants, while the United States has approximately 315 million, as opposed to China, which has over 1.34 billion individuals. Thus, obviously then, China cultivates far more of its land and also requires more land for dwellings and buildings. Furthermore, China has vast tracks of desert and mountains.

Canada, China and US have about the same area, but the respective forest area for Canada and the US is actually about 3 m sq km each as compared to China’s 2 m sq km.

China is resource poor per capita wise and that’s why it has to double up its effort doing “everything”, even in forest area. While Canada and the US held steady since 1990, China made a net 31% gain in forest area from about 1.6 m sq km in 1990 to 2. m in 2010. A good conservation effort indeed.

Another economic power that held steady of its own forest area since 1990 is the 24th ranked Japan with about 0.25 m sq km. Although Japan is higher in paper consumption than the US per capita per this article, it consumes its share of trees mostly of import from nation like Indonesia who have seen its forest area depleted by about an alarming rate of 20% since 1990 to less than 1 m sq km in 2010.

In addition to planting more trees (to make every day an Arbor day?), it's high time to reduce per capita paper consumption for each major nation of economy, IMO.

Well, China has a lot of previous deforestation to make up for (more than 3,000 years' worth, to be precise). The whole of 黄土高原 (Yellow heights) was once a forest, but now an arid land with LOTS of gully erosion. Legends accuse the First Emperor of having all the trees cut down for his Great Wall, his Palace, and his Mausoleum...

"In Belgium paper consumption is pushed up by the EU bureaucracy in Brussels, which must produce its documentation in an array of different languages. The chart shows apparent paper consumption (production plus imports minus exports), which can distort results as it includes paper exported as other products. Finland, for instance, produces a lot of paper and converts it into packaging domestically, exaggerating its paper usage. The same is true for Austria, Sweden and Germany."

America is home of the UN, nothing is produced in different languages in America? Paper is not converted into packages in America? Why all of the apologizing for the EU paper wasters?

Not every country. No excuse is made for Japan's apparently high consumption either. Which is strange, because they have the excellent recycling practice of using shredded office paper as bedding for the cattle used to produce Kobe beef.

The large amount of paper use is very important for the economy. If banks, apartments and phone companies reduced the lengths of their contracts below the 200-page average, it would be too easy for consumers to spot how they're about to get f*d.

Though the local lumbermill can't pay its bills because no one buys fresh cut 40-foot trees. All of our local paper mills have fallen in the last 20 years. We're 450 km from the German border. By freight train, the logs are in Munich or Dusseldorf in 20 hours including packing and et cetera.

The bigger problem is recyckling and glossy magazines.
If Germans stopped recyckling paper, my village would be rich.
The problem, from my point of view is that Germans don't use enough paper. The problem is that no one uses paper anymore.

I demand the death of recyckling because I want my village to be successfull. We have too many trees and not enough orders.
Somehow the local timber mill has been open for 90 years and it hasn't seen worse times ever. The mill survived Hitler, Stalin but it didn't survive Kórwin-Tusk-Sikorski.

Somehow, the local forests have survived 90 years of lumber cutting and still we have too many trees.

Sir, unfortunately you seem to be on the wrong side of history on this one. This is like someone in the early 20th century asking people to stop making/driving cars because he's a horse breeder and cars hurt his business. It's simply wrongheaded.
Look at your forests, preserved and pristine as they are, as something to appreciate, not something to exploit. Yet, if money you must make, there are plenty of other ways to use trees to your advantage.Tourism from places which haven't preserved their environments, that have cut down all of their trees, could be big business for you.

The forests are a huge investment. Cleaning the forests to make them penetrable demands hundreds of millions. To make the forests tourist friendly, half of the tree would have to be cut down in the forest. Tourists won't go into forests where there is a 40 metre tree every 2 meters. The animals don't have where to graze, people and horses can't walk through the forests without getting lost, fires are more rampant when the number of trees makes water scarce because there is competition between trees for ground water.

Here, all of the trees cut today are dead trees or trees which were feld over by strong winds and storms. After a large storm, I can show you about hundreds of trees destroyed by the storms within 20 km of here. The trees lie on the ground, they make the forest impenetrable and are a fire hazard. No one cuts trees here, because the amount of trees nature destroys is too high. A 40 metre tree can be saw odd off its stump when the winds are 80 km/h. If there is a storm with 150 km/h, entire hectares forests can disappear withing an hour.

We had a storm like that a couple years ago, the lumber mills didn't know what to do with all of the spare wood lying in the forests. They tried to salvage it but the majority of the trees feld by the wind and storms rooted because there were not enough buyers in I think 3 years. You can't store wood for trees years and not have it destroyed.

(I'd be amazed if the natural-cut wood in one season but you don't look at the truth, you think more wood= more human cut trees. Nature can destroy hundreds of kilometres of huge forests within a day. You can't do anything about the wind or thunder.)

We don't need tourists. We want industry. If you have a business deal, you come here. Our natural wonders aren't that much different that the rest of the country or world.

No one in Europe buys Greek fish, Polish silver, copper and wood, German beer and technologies, French iron-clad products so that Greek fishermen, Polish miners, German scientists and French workers can live. Areas with 30%+ unemployment are common on our continent.

Is it people's employment or the welfare of unkept forests and towns which matters? The trees grow back very fast. A well kept forest, in which 1/2 of the trees are cut out today, will have in 20 years more and bigger trees than today, if it is rational managed.

Trees grow back very quickly here. They will grow back sometimes within 15 years. Trees will grow, people will breed but scientists will sit in Brussels and Paris and tell me how my backyard really works. I know what I see, no Warsaw or Berlin politic can tell me that trees don't grow well if they're unkept or that this is pollution. Consistent coal use in this county has given us the cleanest air in this part of Europe. Renewal energy such as biomass and windpower have destroyed hundreds of km2 of Europe. My choice is continued consumption and that's it.

Such an excellent plan will provide necessary nutrients for the villagers to metabolize, expose the populace to healthy exercise and recreation, and save the human children thus ensuring the perpetuation of your genes.

Sorry, but you are talking to urbanites who have been brainwashed into thinking the world's forests are on the edge of extinction.

At one time, I owned a tract of planted pine forest in the southeast US. When the trees were ready to thin for pulp, the pulp prices were so depressed, I almost had to pay someone to thin them. The prices remained down for a decade. Why? because there is a glut of pulp trees in the world. It is one of the most renewable resources there is. And these damned enviro-wackos keep preaching paper recycling! :-)

If you look at long term trends in the history of 10,000 years of Civilization, wood fuel has been dominant in 98% of the duration.

Coal has only been used in the past 150 years. Petroleum fuel has dominated only the last 100 years. Same with natural gas. Nuclear is about 50 years old. Solar and Wind less than 30 years on a widescale basis. Wave and Geothermal energy is still embryonic.

And the electrical grid is only 100 years old.

A baby, toddler or young person today will likely see the end of oil in their lifetime.

A conventional, reliable, internal combustion engine car bought new today and kept for 20 years, will probably run out of available fuel and become an obsolete museum piece even if it remains serviceable.

Fuel will never become absolutely extinct. IT will just rise to exorbitant costs: $10, $15, $20, or $50/ gallon. For some old cars, the fuel in the tank will cost more than the value of the vehicle.

It is foolish to believe unlimited and inexpensive petroleum can continue. Petroleum is champagne living, but it is also finite and the bottle is empty. It is a napalm future. And it has scorched the planet.

Know UNSUSTAINABLE when you see it.

Your Countdown Clock is Ticking.

I predict when petroleum energy is exhausted, then we will go back to WOOD and plant biofuels. Wood, switchgrass and even algae may be made into vehicle fuels.

The Pacific Northwest is the Saudi Arabia of Wood. Environmental policy is concentrated in keeping the trees intact and unlogged, instead of sustainable regular harvesting. It is backwards policy.

Bio fuels and wood can be used to generate electricity, hot water and heating. It is a virtuous cycle: CO2 is extracted by trees and plants; it is balanced by burning. Instead of massive forest wildfires, we control burning for power generation and heat.

Eventually we will be a wood based society again. But not just trees, but biofuels of fast growing bamboo, switch grasses, canes, corn, crops, jute, seaweed and algae. There is more biomass in seaweed than in terrestrial land plants! The planet is 70% water by surface area....Few cultures use seaweed for anything... most see it as garbage of the sea.

Biofuels are as sustainable as the day is long...And are underutilized for the sake of petroleum.

Know that petroleum was once biomass, dinosaurs of yesteryear.

10,000 years of history is hard to contradict. 1 million ago there were trees and forests. And trees and forest will be around in the next 50 years after oil runs out. And they will be around photosynthesizing long after silicon panels and windmills go kaput.

Not all plants are as capable as some in producing biofuels like biodiesel and ethanol (remembering that ethanol for fuel purposes is derived from the fermentation by yeast). Traditionally, ethanol has been derived from agricultural crops like sugar cane and corn and studies have shown that the energy expenditure required to develop biofuels in this manner far exceeds the output.

Now it seems that your point is to use plants grown in their natural habitat (ie: not agriculturally produced) for these biofuels. This, also, seems infeasible, at least for the kind of scale that would be needed to replace petroleum. Imagine a farmer having to trawl acres and acres of forest, foraging through low-potential plants to harvest the biofuel-producing plants.

There's no question that fossil fuels will need to be replaced in the near future, but I also know unsustainable when I see it, and biofuel is unsustainable.

"studies have shown that the energy expenditure required to develop biofuels in this manner far exceeds the output"

No they haven't. Certainly not for sugarcane, which has been designated by the USDOE as an advanced biofuel because of it; the EROEI is well above 1. The studies you're referring to are a spectrum that measure the EROEI of corn ethanol as between roughly 0.9 and 1.2, on the borderline between using more energy than they output anyway.

Biofuel is not unsustainable. Corn ethanol is, even if people are using feedlot corn unsuitable for human consumption. For those poor schmucks in Europe making wheat ethanol, they have no excuse. Know the difference.

The markets will fix the situation. If there is truly a problem, we'll have to accept 10 EURO per litre of petrol. It'll cause less savings for wealthy countries and we'll have to have more trains. Maybe in a battle with pollution and dwindling oil supplies, the EU will forbid airplane flights between bordering states or distances 500-1000 km apart. Using an airplane to go from London to Manchester or from Paris to Rome is insanity. The train system is good enough that we should use it more.

Having studied this recently in class, I have high confidence in the ability of biofuels to supply decent amounts of energy, especially should algae biodiesel take off. But efficiently generating energy from cellulosic crops (wood, brush, corn husks, etc) is quite difficult, due to high moisture contents and difficulty of breaking cellulose down enzymatically into easier burning sugars or alcohols.

I'm more concerned with whether we will make this transition before the climate has been too drastically changed. Once oil becomes rare and expensive, all those oil profits will go into alternative energy development rather than offshore drilling and shale gas. The consumers will get their energy fix, but the environmental cost is worrisome.

Why is Belgium so different from France? Is it not because EU headquarters are in Brussels? Each bureaucrat should mean a good dozen of trees each year; a small forest. And a proof of how far away we are of the paperless office.

This part from TFA: "The chart shows apparent paper consumption (production plus imports minus exports), which can distort results as it includes paper exported as other products. Finland, for instance, produces a lot of paper and converts it into packaging domestically, exaggerating its paper usage. The same is true for Austria, Sweden and Germany."

The US population's total approximate use (using the averages on this site):
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1743 million logs.
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The European population's total approximate use (using the averages on this site):
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3879 million logs.
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Which, per capita, is actually roughly equal.
.
,
Of course, this is a highly Euro-centric study to begin with. Why separate the EU states when you don't separate the US states? I suppose the US is far more unified, but I'm still interested in the differences in the uses of paper between the varied US states. It might exlain quite a bit of the number.

I have crusaded against paper towels since college, when multiple rolls would be used to clean up after parties (alongside hundred of empty beer cans being disposed of in equally, environmentally-offensive ways).

If you are diligent with laundry, dish towels can be used in place of paper towels. In fact, when I think about it, drying my hands after washing comprises the majority of my consumption of paper towels...something the air does just as well (though not as quickly).

How about extending the argument to toilet paper? Wonder how many tons of toilet paper we consume and how many trees we need to cut to produce the same.
India has very little per capita consumption and part of the credit goes to the fact that Indians do not use toilet paper. Use water instead (where available that is). Much more environment friendly (and cleaner if you ask me)

Well, the real measure should be whether the trees are being harvested in a responsible sustainable fashion. No? In the US there are tons of tree farms, wheras in India and Brazil there is rampant deforestation.